A first look at the National September 11 Memorial

Sunday

Aug 28, 2011 at 12:01 AM

The memorial opens to the public Sept. 12, one day after the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks.

By Blair KaminMcClatchy Newspapers

NEW YORK — It is not enough for the National September 11 Memorial, which will open here in just a few weeks, to provide a venue for the public expression of grief. Because the memorial sits amid one of the nation's great urban centers, not on a rural battlefield or the National Mall, it must meet a higher standard, one that is as much about renewal as remembrance and public space as much as private meditation.Assessing whether the memorial has attained these goals is a perilous business. It remains a construction site, not a serene enclave. Its two signature reflecting pools, which evoke the destroyed twin towers, are not yet fully operational, and as of last Wednesday, just 254 of its 415 swamp white oak trees had been planted. Visitors have not inhabited the site, which opens to the public Sept. 12, one day after the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks.Nonetheless, with the broad outlines of the memorial finally in place, some initial observations can be made: It is not a work of blazing aesthetic originality. But it appears poised to pack a powerful emotional punch and may help ground zero's rebuilders to achieve the seemingly impossible goal of simultaneously commemorating the dead and creating a lively city.The second part of the $700 million project, an underground museum, is scheduled to open next year, according to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, the organization that spearheaded the memorial's construction and will manage it.As shaped by New York architect Michael Arad and Berkeley, Calif., landscape architect Peter Walker, the memorial occupies roughly half of the 16-acre World Trade Center site. At its heart are the reflecting pools, each an acre in size and set within the footprints of the destroyed twin towers. Ringing the perimeter of the pools are elegant bronze panels displaying the names of those killed on 9/11 in New York, Washington and Shanksville, Pa., and in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center — in all, 2,983 men, women and children. Water cascades into the pools, then drops again into a square void in the middle of each pool. The bottoms of the square voids can be glimpsed, but not in their entirety.Arad's aim, as the 42-year-old architect told me during a tour, was to “evoke a persistent absence, one that isn't erased by the passage of time.” He has done so in a way that is less cloying than the empty chairs at the memorial that recognizes the victims of the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, but it is not especially fresh.Indeed, anyone who has seen the black granite wedge of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington is bound to remark upon its superficial similarities to the September 11 Memorial. (That memorial's designer, Maya Lin, was a powerful force on the jury that in 2003 plucked a design by the unknown Arad from 5,201 entries, then suggested that he team up with a veteran landscape architect, who turned out to be Walker. Their design was named the winner in 2004.)Both memorials are works of abstract minimalism, which emphasizes simple geometric shapes and minimal amounts of color and texture. Yet, if the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was novel and captivating when it opened 29 years ago, it is hard to say that about the September 11 Memorial today. Rows of victims' names have practically become a cliche.But memorials are not built to impress critics with the latest aesthetic fashions. They exist to remember and honor the dead — in this case, those who were killed by terrorists in 1993 and 2001. And the September 11 memorial seems likely to achieve that goal, in large part due to its deviations from minimalist abstraction.There is something distinctly nonabstract about a ring of trees around the reflecting pools: The trees precisely replicate the footprints of the twin towers, 212 feet by 212 feet each, as surely as the pools evoke the towers' absence. This isn't slavish nostalgia or pandering to the families of the victims. Rooting the memorial in the particular qualities of its site sends a clear message: This is where people were murdered, where the towers pancaked downward in an apocalyptic vision of smoke, fire and ash. This is not a memorial that could be anywhere; it could only have been built here.The waterfalls, expected to be flowing constantly once the memorial opens, further relieve its abstractness. During my first visit to the site last week, they were turned off, and the memorial appeared painfully austere, almost a visual bore. Then, during my second tour, the waterfalls came on — and what a difference they made. They endowed the memorial with luminosity, animation, delight and a strong focus. The wind makes the waterfalls arc outward in ever-changing patterns. As the sun slices into the mist, small rainbows appear. “A happy discovery,” said Arad, who had not expected that his design would produce this symbol of hope.Rows of victims' names may be overused, but there is still something endearing about the way Arad and his firm, Handel Architects, have displayed them. At night, light will shine upward from the names, which are incised into the bronze panels. The names are also arranged into “meaningful adjacencies” that reflect the victims' proximity on 9/11. Those who perished in the former 1 World Trade Center, also known as the north tower, are memorialized along the north pool, for example. So are the crew and passengers of American Airlines Flight 11, the plane that hit that tower.Not every name is so appropriately linked to a specific place — the police and firefighters killed on 9/11 are all honored at the south pool — but the special arrangements add to the memorial's touching specificity.It is hard not to imagine groups of families or next of kin visiting together and hugging.The names suggest that the dead should be mourned collectively — and that public spaces are an appropriate venue for such commemoration in addition to their everyday roles of accommodating recreation and relaxation.Indeed, one question about the memorial is how its managers will balance these roles — in essence, whether the memorial's identity as sacred ground will snuff out the very activities it is supposed to invite. Would a visitor be allowed to play Frisbee there? Walk the dog? The National September 11 Memorial & Museum will need to strike a balance between dignity and vitality as it sets the rules for using this public space.More important issues arise from the memorial's relationship to New York: Will the memorial be good for the city? And will the city be good for the memorial? Here, there is reason for both hope and caution.If nothing else, the vast, light-filled open space stands in stark contrast to the dark canyons of lower Manhattan. Its enormous scale suggests the magnitude of the loss, both to individuals and the nation, on 9/11. But size alone is hardly the measure of a great urban space.One of the most appealing aspects of the memorial is that it doesn't repeat the urban planning mistakes of the original World Trade Center. The trade center's plaza became an emblem of the barren, wind-swept open spaces that architects were putting up alongside steel-and-glass skyscrapers in the 1960s, deadening and dehumanizing cities in the process. In addition, the memorial improves upon architect Daniel Libeskind's ground zero master plan by dispensing with its poetic but impractical idea of an excavated pit that would have beckoned visitors to journey down to bedrock.Instead, the memorial is at street level, which will allow pedestrians to flow directly into it from surrounding streets. Walker and one of his partners at PWP Landscape Architecture, Matthew Donham, have softened its starkness with rows of swamp white oaks that are arranged at random intervals, like the beads on an abacus.The trees, which will grow to double their current height of 25-30 feet, lend the sprawling site shade, texture and an innate human scale. When the wind blows, their rustling leaves provide an added layer of sound atop the waterfalls, muffling the noise of traffic.Clearings provide much-needed open spaces, such as an area in the memorial's southwest corner where the victims' names are expected to be read every Sept. 11. The landscape architects wisely have forgone the crowd-pleasing exuberance of perennials in favor of a more sober plant palette of the trees and ground cover. A survivor tree, a Callery pear that lost all of its limbs in the attacks but has since grown new ones, is a powerful symbol of resilience and regeneration.Granite benches are distributed generously, offering visitors a place to sit, linger or converse.All in all, then, the memorial seems well-positioned to attract casual, everyday visitors as well as those who make pilgrimages.But this is ground zero, where nothing is ever simple. Initially, visitors to the memorial will have to make ticket reservations and pass through a security checkpoint at the site's southwest corner. The arrangement is to last about 18 months, Arad said. But due to the persistent threat of terrorism, it is not hard to imagine that the site's managers, pressed by politicians, might find reason to extend it. For the foreseeable future, at least, the noble idea of reintegrating the memorial with the city street grid remains little more than fantasy.There is also reason for apprehension about the four enormous office towers being built around the memorial. Three, including the planned 1,776-foot 1 World Trade Center, will rise to heights taller than 1,000 feet. The fourth will climb to nearly 1,000 feet. True, the towers will form the equivalent of walls that frame the memorial, transforming it into what architects call an “urban room.” And the people working in them will bring vitality to the memorial. But their scale is nothing less than staggering and offers perhaps the biggest reason to be concerned that the redevelopment of ground zero will leave us with a new version of the twin towers' old, city-deadening gigantism.Striking an appropriate balance between the commemorative and the commercial has always been ground zero's greatest urban planning challenge. But as the 10th anniversary of the attacks approaches and one looks back at all the battles that made these hallowed 16 acres a capital of contention — clashing architectural visions, political posturing and esoteric legal fights — there should at least be relief about the memorial.Some will mistake its toughness for cold starkness, but the design derives its strength from its unflinching stoicism and specificity. “We were memorializing a loss,” said Paula Grant Berry, a member of the memorial jury, whose husband was killed in the attacks, as she gazed out on the waterfalls in the north pool. Though not profoundly original, the memorial still rises to a level of noble simplicity, one that could well be enhanced by the presence of people and their interaction with the victims' names and each other.